The Most Famous Call of Duty Map Is Now a Real-Life Course
Call of Duty has been around for a long time, and as such, the game has released some iconic maps. Now the most popular map has been turned into a sports course.
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The famous and long-running Call of Duty first-person shooter series had some truly iconic maps over the course of its run, but none of them are quite as famous as Nuketown — a close-quarters, fast-paced nature that saw multiple iterations over the years but remained a fan favorite despite minute changes that were introduced. Now, Call of Duty players get to enjoy their favorite map as it has been laid out in real life as Nuketown paintball.
Though this sounds like fresh news, in reality, it isn’t — according to Destructoid, the famous Call of Duty map has inspired quite a few real-life replicas at paintball parks. The in-game map was positioned as an eerie, uncanny testing site for nuclear weapons, based on the real-world testing facilities from the +50s. It’s a typical United States suburb recreation, with manicured lawns, cookie-cutter homes, white picket fences, and school buses. You can see the map below:
Most Call of Duty players may remember the numerous creepy-looking mannequins located throughout the map, designed to simulate so-called nuclear families. Following the release of the original map in 2010’s Call of Duty: Black Ops, different versions of the maps were featured in every subsequent Call of Duty release, which is a sign of its longevity and legacy as an iconic staple of the world’s most famous first-person shooter franchise.
Hardcore, die-hard Call of Duty fans can now experience the exhilaration of close-quarter combat on a real-life recreation of Nuketown at Xtreme Paintball in the St Louis Metro area — a trending course among outdoor paintball enthusiasts. However, the real-life iterations of the map have been a trend among outdoor recreational parks for quite some time now. The first among these was the Nuketown 2013, an event in East Dundee, Illinois, sponsored by Tippmann, a paintball gear company.
Another park, also called Xtreme Paintball, but with no associations with the one previously mentioned, started advertising a Nuketown course in 2016. Even Activision Blizzard hosted their iteration of the Nuketown paintball event in Los Angeles the same year, which only attests to the map’s never-ending popularity. However, Nuketown isn’t the only map that got its live-action treatment; other maps, like Shipment, have gotten theirs as well.
It’s interesting to think how Call of Duty, one of the most influential first-person shooter games, besides the iconic Halo, which changed the genre forever, also influenced real-life combat simulations all around the world, prompting many to offer their own live-action iterations of Call of Duty’s in-game maps. The list of maps that have received live-action treatments doesn’t end, and it’s probably as long as the list of the franchise’s maps altogether.
Ultimately, everyone can agree that it’s pretty awesome to do paintball on a real-life iteration of the Call of Duty map, and dozens of paintball parks posted the exact same replicas, attesting to the franchise’s greatness. It does seem like an interesting experience, and we strongly advise anyone who has the opportunity to go paintballing, regardless of their previous experience with the outdoor activity, to check out the real-life Call of Duty map.
